Social Media and Travel

We’re getting ready to launch a new workshop this spring on Technology and the Entrepreneur, so I’ve been doing more reading on technology. I’ve been reading stuff from the usual places, but I've also have been trying to read some other voices to see what they’re saying about new technology…even if it may not be specifically directed to the entrepreneurial world. In doing so, I came across an interest piece in Travel and Leisure on the Social Media Revolution, and how it’s impacting the travel world. Take a look at it, written by Peter Lindburg. From the article:

"It’s increasingly hard to imagine those antediluvian days, back when information was static and scarce and costly besides; before the data flood swallowed us up. Actually, I don’t have to imagine it: my wife and I were just in Tokyo, where neither her BlackBerry nor my early-model iPhone worked on Japan’s 3G network. For the first time in recent memory, we were completely off the grid—in the most technologically advanced city on earth.

With our smart phones rendered dumb, we made do with a cheap rented mobile that did nothing except—get this—make phone calls. No SMS, no MMS, no GPS, no Web browser, no Google Maps, no currency converter, no translator app, no camera, no Scrabble. This might have felt vaguely liberating if we were, say, camping in Vermont. But we were in Tokyo, a city as bewildering as it is vast. Take away any connection to the information cloud, and we might as well have been on a raft in the Sea of Japan.

The more ways we devise to connect, inform, or amuse ourselves—the more tricks our gadgets learn—the more aggravated we become when they don’t work. Which is often. The digital world may be growing up fast, but at the moment it’s going through an ornery adolescence, that awkward beta-phase when expectations outpace capacity and the default setting is frustration."

I also ran across one of those “Did You Know” videos, this time on social media. Not sure I really like those things (maybe it’s the annoying music, or maybe it’s the general attitude imbedded in them that’s irritating to me), but thought it was something of interest and worthwhile to post here.